Slide
Dear Slide, I luv u guys, srsly. kthxbai.
Photo credit: Meghan
My journey at Slide comes to an end today, when I leave this evening I will once again return to being a free agent (if only for two days). Some of my coworkers have casually referred to my writings over the past few days of my "memoirs", which isn't too far off to be honest. When I leave Slide this evening, my employment will have accounted for roughly 10% of my entire life and 50% of my adult life. Writing my side of the story down, to some extent, has been more about telling a story to myself and less about telling it to anybody else (apologies). So much of my time spent at Slide has been in a state of controlled choas that at times it's hard for me to remember when things were done, who was doing them and the order in which they happened.
The two questions I've invariably gotten since I gave my notice and subsequently started writing this series of posts have been: why are you leaving and where are you going? My reasons for leaving are irrelevant, I will say that if I could take the people I've been working with at Slide with me, I would. I've learned such an incredible amount from those that I've worked with, both technical and non-technical, while at Slide. Whenever I would pitch friends on the idea of joining Slide, my take-home point was always "when you join Slide, you will not be the smartest person there." I feel lucky that I was given the opportunity to "come of age" as a young engineer in a company of so many tremendously talented individials, given the chance for a do-over, I would still play my cards the way I've played them. I joined Slide a punk kid from Texas, I'm leaving Slide a slightly-more-learned punk kid from Texas.
As to where I am going, after an extended vacation of Saturday and Sunday, I will be joining my second startup ever (Slide's a pretty good first time out) on Monday. When I started looking at other companies I had a couple of criteria, I wanted to join a smaller team (Slide's upwards of a hundred people or so) and I had to really like who I would be working with. Tristan, Jesse, Can (John) and the team from Apture fit both criteria. I'm not going to go into detail about what I'm really going to be doing there or where Apture is going as a company. I will say that after two and a half years of working and studying at Slide, I'm looking forward to employing what I've learned and continuing my education at Apture.
See you on the beaches of the world.
Continuing on from part 1 and part 2
Prior to joining Slide, a friend of mine "whurley" had nicknamed me the "Angry Young Man" which I promptly put on my first set of business cards (my current business cards list my title as "Meta-Chief Platform Architect, Enterprise Edition", I received them after mentioning a failed poaching attempt by LinkedIn to Max); when Top Friends went dark on Facebook, I was a little more than an "angry young man."
Given my close involvement with the product, the amount of sleepless nights working on it, the actions against Top Friends felt personal to me, regardless of the posturing between Slide and Facebook's executives. As hours turned into days offline, it became clear to me that the suspension of the application was far less about our privacy hole and far more about Facebook making an example out of Top Friends to the rest of the platform development community. The message was heard loud and clear by the majority of the developers that I knew, this is not your platform, these are not your users and you will play by our rules or we will wipe you from the face of the site. Building on the platform was not only no more fun, it was also a risky business decision.
At the time of the suspension, Keith and I had already started discussing what a "TopFriends.com" might look like, as the signals of platform instability for applications were already being sent.
When I finished up writing part 1 of my journey at Slide yesterday, I had just recounted becoming "the Top Friends guy", savvy readers might have noted that I had not moved off of Dave's couch at the time. I am uncertain whether it is a record to be proud of, but I held the position of "the guy on Dave's couch" for two months. With the leadup to the "F8" conference I didn't have a whole lot of time to find an apartment, Dave being an all around nice guy and amazing cook, wasn't helping my motivation to leave either. That said, I'm a delightful house guest, honest.
Shortly after the initial successes of the Top Eight product, and the launch of "FunWall" (renamed "FunSpace" later), Slide quickly converted the desktop client team to the "Facebook Team" with 4-5 engineers hacking on Facebook applications to capitalize as quickly as possible on the wild-west nature of the platform at the time. We subsequently launched another couple apps, such as "My Questions" an application that allowed you to poll your friends (likely our most "useful" application). I ended up writing another application alongside Top Eight called "Fortune Cookie", contrasted to My Questions, it was probably our most useless application. The application was absolutely brilliant (Mike and Max get credit here again), the profile box for the application was a picture of a fortune cookie with a fortune overlaid. Brilliant.
As some of you may, or may not know, this friday October 23rd will be my final day as a Slide employee. With my journey at Slide nearing its completion, I wanted to document some of how I've gotten here and where I've started, if for nobody other than myself.
Officially I started at Slide April 2nd, 2007, though my journey to Slide started far earlier. At the end of my fourth semester at Texas A&M my then girlfriend, now fianceé and I decided we were through with College Station and to move to San Antonio; most Texans would consider this a lateral move at best. I had every intention of resuming my studies at UTSA following a brief stint at San Antonio College clearing up pre-requisites with a slightly lower price tag. By the end of fall semester it had become clear that I wasn't cut out for college, I stopped attending and focused full time on software. At the time most of my experience and contacts were through the Mac development community, primarily via IRC on the Freenode network and developer mailing lists for various open source projects. Through my involvement in the Bonjour mailing lists and work with the API, I had at one point impressed Bonjour's original inventor Stuart Cheshire enough to land an interview at Apple for the Core OS group, working on Bonjour.
Last week @admc, despite being a big proponent of Windmill, needed to use WatiN for a change. WatiN has the distinct capability of being able to work with Internet Explorer's HTTPS support as well as frames, a requirement for the task at hand. As adorable as it was to watch @admc, a child of the dynamic language revolution, struggle with writing in C# with Visual Studio and the daunting "Windows development stack," the prospect of a language shift at Slide towards C# on Windows is almost laughable. Since Slide is a Python shop, IronPython became the obvious choice.
Out of an hour or so of "extreme programming" which mostly entailed Adam watching as I wrote IronPython in his Windows VM, IronWatin was born. IronWatin itself is a very simple test runner that hooks into Python's "unittest" for creating integration tests with WatiN in a familiar environment.
I intended IronWatin to be as easy as possible for "native Python" developers, by abstracting out updates to sys.path to include the Python standard lib (adds the standard locations for Python 2.5/2.6 on Windows) as well as adding WatiN.Core.dll via clr.AddReference() so developers can simply import IronWatin; import WatiN.Core and they're ready to start writing integration tests.
